Good bookkeeping is the foundation of a profitable reselling business. Here's everything you need to set it up right.
Bookkeeping for resellers involves tracking four core things: income from sales, expenses (platform fees, postage, packaging), cost of goods sold (what you paid for each item), and bank reconciliation (matching your records to what actually flows through your bank). If you get these four things right, tax time is straightforward and you always know whether you're actually making money.
Many resellers focus only on revenue and ignore the rest. This leads to nasty surprises at tax time — or worse, the false belief that they're profitable when they're actually losing money after fees, postage, and COGS.
The ATO requires every business to keep records of all business transactions for at least five years. For resellers, this means keeping records of every sale, every expense, every item purchased for resale, and every bank transaction related to the business. Records can be digital or paper, but they must be in English and accurately reflect your business transactions.
Weekly is ideal. Monthly is the minimum for most resellers. Leaving bookkeeping to the end of the financial year is a recipe for disaster — you'll forget transactions, lose receipts, and spend days trying to reconstruct months of activity.
A good rhythm is to spend 30 minutes every Sunday reviewing the week's sales, entering any expenses, and reconciling your bank balance. If that sounds like a lot, consider that this habit typically saves 10+ hours at tax time and gives you ongoing visibility into your true profitability.
Spreadsheets work fine when you're selling fewer than 20 items per month. Beyond that, the manual data entry becomes a bottleneck and errors creep in. Dedicated accounting software for resellers automates much of the process — importing sales data from platforms, calculating fees, and matching transactions to your bank account.
The main options are general accounting platforms (Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks) and purpose-built reseller tools. General platforms require significant manual setup to handle reseller workflows, while purpose-built tools understand concepts like per-item COGS and multi-platform fee reconciliation out of the box.
Without proper bookkeeping records, you're forced to estimate your income and expenses — which the ATO doesn't look kindly upon. Poor records mean you'll likely over-report income (to be safe) and under-claim deductions (because you can't prove them), paying more tax than necessary. Or you'll under-report income and risk penalties if the ATO audits you.
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